Juniors Sara Seaman ’16 and Sonia Miklaucic ’16 put their two talents together to create their own online shoe business.

While together in Madrid in the middle of June, Seaman and Miklaucic had the idea of creating their own business. The two had been seeing big companies create sneakers with designs on them and thought they could do the same.

Miklaucic had been drawing on her shoes for a while already. “It kind of just came to us one day that we could probably do that on our own and do it pretty well,” she said.

“It clicked that both of our talents work really well together and that we could possibly become successful in something that’s women-run,” Seaman said.

As summer break went on, Seaman had to travel to England and Miklaucic to Germany, and the idea of their company faded away until school started again in August.

“We got back together and thought, ‘Oh, we should try to make this happen again,'” Seaman said.

Seaman started creating the website, and the two began planning how to get the shoes and how to plan designs.

They then made a Facebook page, Instagram, and a GoFundMe fundraiser. With donations from their family and friends, their idea started to take shape.

“We raised enough money that we could fill out forms for taxes and for factitious business names… It was a really lengthy and difficult process… but it was a good process to go through,” said Seaman.

Once someone submits an order on the store’s website, Seaman gets an email from Paypal.

“It tells me what they want, what size, everything like that,” she said.

The business uses plain black or white sneakers that are hand-painted by Miklaucic. The finished products are then picked up at their houses and shipped out to the customers.

Miklaucic says there’s no real process of designing a shoe.

“For the most part we just kind of bounce off ideas and Sara will text me with an idea and I’ll kind of research some pictures and figure something out,” she said.

“We’ve definitely had ideas where it was kind of too big and not, like, contained enough of an image,” she said, “so we’ve kind of kept those ideas in the back of our minds for now.”

They plan to expand to jean jackets, jean shorts and laptop cases, Seaman said.

“Kind of the same idea of creating really cool, usable art,” she said.

When asked to describe their shoe store in three words, Miklaucic said, “Actually I kind of like what you just said. ‘Cool, usable art.'” The two friends laughed in agreement. “Yeah, I think that works.”

Seaman and Miklaucic would also like the Archer community to know their website is gender-neutral. This means there are no distinct men’s and women’s category.

“There are men sizes and female sizes, but all the shoes are collectively in the same area because we believe in not stereotyping certain colors, certain designs, and certain genders. And we also believe that there are more than just two genders in the world. That’s something that’s important to us,” Seaman said.